In that randori I mentioned, I do remember seeing at least five individuals coming at me repeatedly, one at a time with no pause between. But for the life of me, I am unable to resurrect a single countermove on my part. I was told later people were tumbling in all directions.That was a set of memories I sure wish I could have kept first hand.

-It also says:The average officer in the experiment was 4 times more likely to remember “external” elements associated with the threat (the type of weapon presented, the suspect’s behavior, etc.) than “internal” elements (such as an awareness of his/her own thoughts and physical behavior).-this narrow focus simultaneously caused them to “miss other items about the scene that may later turn out to be important, and impaired their ability to provide full and complete reports about the incident-Officers who were interviewed, on the other hand, had error rates that were “very high,” averaging more than 5 mistaken memories apiece in their accounts of what happenedDr. Lewinski and Dr. Alexis Artwohl and others also make the following points-The mind is not a recorder.Memory is effected by previous experience and emotion.Memory cannot be trusted to be accurate because of these influences.Past experience can cause false memory.The mind records things in order of importance not occurance.So stress can have a detrimental effect on memory in a undamaged brain.

Good training will result in automatic bahavior which the subject will not have any memory of.

According to the quote I gave though, it indicates that memories like that can be brought back up through talkign about the incident with others there. Nowhere do they say that there will be behavior that you won't have memory of nor be able to somehow retrieve, though initially external factors are much much easier to remember.

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Member of DaJoGen MMA school under Dave Hagen and Team Chaos fight team under Denver Mangiyatan and Chris Toquero, ran out of Zanshin Martial Arts in Salem Oregon: http://www.zanshinarts.org/Home.aspx,

As far as I can tell it's just saying that the focus points can strongly effect memory retrieval and what comes back easiest. Now, you probably would never be able to break down step by step your physical movements, but knowledge of what you did overall I firmly believe can be retrieved eventually.

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Member of DaJoGen MMA school under Dave Hagen and Team Chaos fight team under Denver Mangiyatan and Chris Toquero, ran out of Zanshin Martial Arts in Salem Oregon: http://www.zanshinarts.org/Home.aspx,

While yes that's technically true it's what most people know actions that don't require thinking as so it's a convenient term. And for the record we do have instincts, we do have in-born behavioral traits. No reputable psychologist in the world would tell you we're a blank slate anymore that hasn't been a well accepted idea since B.F. Skinner was alive and active.

Humans may not have instincts per-se but regardless of whether we do or not, we benefit from motor-learning (a.k.a muscle memory) which conditions automatic responses reducing movement time and improving prediction and anticipation of the required response based on familiarity with the stimuli. It's a pretty well researched and accepted field of psychology.

You know what, reading back through the thread I'm out of my depth on this one. I retract my statement.

I'm curious though as to what the two sides of the argument are in this thread, could you clarify for me? You appear to be talking about memory under stress when the topic started out with conditioned and/or instinctual responses.

If we're discussing how to get familiar with the effects of adrenaline for the purposes of self defence, how is memory of the stressful incident after the fact related to this training? Perhaps in terms of identifying your assailants?

What is your stance on the instinctual response? Does it exist? Can it be improved through training? Other people have more clearly stated their opinions on these issues.

I believe the question here is not really whether instincts exist or not, but what kind of prior training (if any) can benefit us during in a high adrenaline situation.